We will illustrate the acquisition of alternative data using web scraping, targeting first OpenTable restaurant data, and then move to earnings call transcripts hosted by Seeking Alpha.
Working with alternative data
Scraping OpenTable data
Typical sources of alternative data are review websites such as Glassdoor or Yelp that convey insider insights using employee comments or guest reviews. This data provides valuable input for ML models that aim to predict a business' prospects or directly its market value to obtain trading signals.
The data needs to be extracted from the HTML source, barring any legal obstacles. To illustrate the web scraping tools that Python offers, we'll retrieve information on restaurant bookings...
